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The Life and Death of Sexual Difference Louis Van Den Hengel Maastricht University, [email protected]

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The Life and Death of Sexual Difference Louis Van Den Hengel Maastricht University, L.Vandenhengel@Maastrichtuniversity.Nl Criticism Volume 58 | Issue 1 Article 8 2016 The Life and Death of Sexual Difference Louis van den Hengel Maastricht University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Feminist Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation van den Hengel, Louis (2016) "The Life and Death of Sexual Difference," Criticism: Vol. 58 : Iss. 1 , Article 8. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol58/iss1/8 THE LIFE AND In Becoming Undone, Elizabeth Grosz connects Charles Darwin’s DEATH OF SEXUAL account of biological evolution as DIFFERENCE an unpredictable and open-ended Louis van den Hengel process of variation to the phi- losophies of Henri Bergson, Gilles Becoming Undone: Darwinian Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray in Reflections on Life, Politics, and order to elaborate a more or less Art by Elizabeth Grosz. Durham, neomaterialist ontology of sexual NC: Duke University Press, difference as the engine of natu- 2011. Pp. 264. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 ral existence, the vital mechanism paper. productive of the complexity and excesses of life as we may or may not know it. The book is set over and against what Grosz perceives as a postmodern feminism in which notions of nature and matter have been sidelined, and where, more precisely, ontological inquiries into the constitution of life have been subsumed under epistemologi- cal considerations of how bodies come to matter exclusively in terms of language, discourse, and cul- ture. Grosz, in contrast, develops a Darwinian feminism and a post- modern Darwinism that attempts to rethink the materiality of sexual difference through the inhuman time of evolutionary becoming. Whereas feminist theorists have generally been reluctant to engage with Darwinian thought beyond the scope of epistemological cri- tique, Grosz’s work takes a differ- ent and more affirmative approach. The aim of Becoming Undone is not to address the androcentrism apparent in Darwin’s theory of evo- lution, nor to assess the essentialist approaches to sexual and racial Criticism Winter 2016, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 153–162. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.58.1.0153 153 © 2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd 153 17/03/17 11:17 am 154 LOUIS van DEN HENGEL differences within neo-Darwinian folded into matter as the potential sociobiology or evolutionary psy- to become different. This nonteleo- chology, but rather to take hold of logical reading of Darwin is directly what in Darwin’s work is useful for opposed to the traditions of social the elaboration of feminist thought Darwinism that tend to reduce all beyond postmodern theories of evolutionary mechanisms to the power and difference, and past the teleological principle of survival—a limits of egalitarian politics of rec- reduction that has on more than one ognition. Against this background, occasion facilitated a classification Grosz advances a philosophy of of humanity as the pinnacle of cre- life and matter as deeply attuned ation that runs counter to Darwin’s not only to each other but to the own work. Indeed, Grosz posits a generative force of duration—the fundamental continuity between becoming and unbecoming— individuals and species of all kinds, through which biological evolution not because they share a common proceeds as an open-ended process genealogy, but because all of life is of differentiation, especially sexual enjoined in the transformation of differentiation. matter. Grosz’s Darwinism, then, Starting from the basic is a highly Deleuzian one in which Darwinian insight that the differ- evolution is construed as a trans- ences between humans and other versal force of creative transforma- animal species, as well as among tion, an impersonal cut across the human beings, are differences in boundaries between organic and degree and not in kind, Grosz uses inorganic vitality, an unpredictable the philosophies of Bergson and and increasingly complex elabora- Deleuze to theorize evolutionary tion of life as the power to differ. emergence not merely as a rela- If, as Deleuze has suggested, tion between different forms of “Darwin’s great novelty was that life but as a dynamic entanglement of inaugurating the thought of between life and the inorganic individual difference,”1 Grosz forces of matter. Life and matter seizes upon Darwin’s idea that it are conceptualized not as binary is sexual difference, in the form of opposites but as divergent tenden- sexual selection, through which cies or trajectories, two different life first elaborates itself as a con- degrees of the same, ever-differing, tinuous process of variation and force of duration: the temporal or creative excess. It is through her evolutionary impulse that enables philosophical exploration of the life to actualize the “vital indeter- relation between sexual and natu- minacy” (34) of the material world ral selection in Darwin’s writings, from which it emerges, to unfold and her subsequent elaboration the dynamic unpredictability that is of a dynamic ontology of sexual Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd 154 17/03/17 11:17 am ON BECOMING UNDONE 155 divergence, that Grosz’s Darwin increasingly mundane fashion, emerges not only as a decisive feminist scholarship from the 1990s theorist of becoming, but—unwit- onwards. Grosz, however, hardly tingly—as “the first feminist of engages with any of the new mate- difference” (142). As unexpected a rial feminisms that have emerged designation this may be for some- as a response to this call, which is one whose vision of evolution regu- one of the reasons why, although larly attests to the biological and I am fully committed to what she social inferiority of women, and has called the “forgotten question of whose personal views about sexual ontology,”3 I remain unconvinced difference may be summed up by by the rhetorical gestures that a calculated list of marriage’s pros underpin the urgency with which and cons describing female com- that question is posed. There are panionship as slightly preferable to few specific references to feminist owning a dog,2 Grosz convincingly scholarship in Becoming Undone, shows how Darwin’s open-ended and Grosz’s repeated criticisms understanding of nature and mat- of “feminist egalitarianism” and ter as constitutive of vital transfor- “postmodern feminism” are not mations may become central to the substantiated by in-depth readings elaboration of a nonanthropocen- of whatever theorists are supposed tric feminism of difference, a “new to be filed under these extremely kind of feminism” (57) that reworks elastic concepts. The book as a the problem of sexual difference in whole lacks much of the meticulous the bio-ontological context of “ani- engagement with feminist theory mal becomings and the becomings that characterized Grosz’s earliest microscopic and imperceptible that work. The assertion that “concepts regulate matter itself” (86). of autonomy, agency, and freedom Like in her previous work, . are continuously evoked in fem- Grosz frames the invocation of the inist theory” but “have been rarely concepts of nature, matter, and life defined, explained, or analyzed” as a turn—or return—to a “more (59), for example, is overly gener- archaic” but also “more modern- alized at best, while observations ist” tradition that has been largely about feminism’s “submersion in neglected in feminist theory (59). the politics of representation” (85) The call to reclaim matter—not and “the overwhelming dominance the materiality of the body, but the of identity politics” (89) sound curi- biological dynamism from which ously quaint in light of Grosz’s own all bodies emerge—from its per- insistence, in the same chapter, ceived absence in feminist theory that what is principally at stake in after the cultural turn is of course feminist theory is the invention of not new, but has pervaded, in an the new. Criticism 58.1_06_BM.indd 155 17/03/17 11:17 am 156 LOUIS van DEN HENGEL If Becoming Undone provides work by reading it as a Deleuzian a foundation for future femi- feminist analysis of difference nist thought, it is not through its avant la lettre. More importantly, account of recent feminist history, the notion of sexual selection in but by means of Grosz’s interpreta- her view explains the persistence tion of evolutionary theory as a way of sexual difference as an ontologi- to rethink the materiality of sexual cal force in the evolution of life. It difference as an entanglement of— is at this point, argues Grosz, that rather than interaction between— “feminists who are committed to the biological, the cultural, and the the concept of the irreducible dif- social.4 To this end, Grosz revisits ference between the sexes,” such Irigaray’s conception of sexual dif- as Irigaray, “may find in Darwin’s ference—as an irreducible ontolog- writings surprising confirmation ical difference—through Darwin’s of their claims” (156). This is a account of sexual selection. Darwin compelling statement, and yet the introduced the concept of sexual interweaving of Irigaray’s ontol- selection in part to explain the ori- ogy of sexual difference with a gins of phenomena that cannot Deleuzian–Darwinian under- be attributed to natural selection, standing of evolution is not with- such as the differences in appear- out problems. The most important ance between male and female ani- difficulties, in my view, arise from mals, the operations of erotic appeal Grosz’s tendency to contain the and attraction, and the presence of vital indeterminacy of matter—its beauty in the natural world. Sexual infinite potential for change and selection hence accounts for the evo- transformation—within a binary of lution of features without any par- sexual difference that is understood ticular survival value, such as large as ontologically impossible to over- antlers or ornate peacock feathers, come.
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